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Politics

Last week, a House Appropriations subcommittee voted to recommend level funding for libraries in FY2018, which would mean roughly $231 million for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), $183 million for the Library Services and Technology Act, and $27 million for the Innovative Approaches to Literacy (IAL) program.

The vote comes after President Trump in May doubled down on his call to eliminate IMLS and virtually all federal funding for libraries, as well as a host of other vital agencies, including the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.

ALA president Jim Neal called the subcommittee vote “one important step in the lengthy congressional appropriations process,” but a development that nevertheless shows that “elected officials are listening to us and recognize libraries’ importance in the communities they represent.”

When the first daughter tweeted about applauding librarians last week, she was not met with much praise. As we know, her father has slashed library budgets wherever he could (and doesn't seem to want to read any books).

Ivanka: This #NationalLibraryWeek, we honor our libraries and librarians for opening our eyes to the world of knowledge, learning and reading!

If you want to keep current with what legislation each house is considering, don't forget the wonderful resource, the Library of Congress which will report what is taking place sans spin (unlike Breitbard, Fox, National Review, etc.).

When you think of Charles and David Koch and their dreams of remaking America into a libertarian paradise, you generally associate them with campaigns to elect rightwing candidates.

And now they’re going after public libraries, because if people want access to books and videos and computers and children’s story hours and public meeting spaces, they should damn well pay for them themselves, not leech taxpayer dollars for the “good” of the “community.”

Reassuringly professional on the whole
Not all the answers fit—my favorite outside-the-rules response to the hypothetical patrons was, “Webster’s Dictionary. Dropped from a great height”—and I would have welcomed more mention of ebooks and audiobooks.
Still, most of the answers were reassuringly professional in the opinion of this nonlibrarian. My favorite was from D.W., a retired librarian and prolific commenter within the LinkedIn group:

“The Library of Congress’s decision is blatant capitulation to political correctness — replacing the correct term ‘illegal alien’ with terms that are both factually and legally incorrect,” the letter, obtained by TheBlaze, read.
“Simply, it is inappropriate for the Library of Congress to unilaterally replace accurate, legal terms with inaccurate, generalized terms in the name of political correctness,” the letter continued.

On Thursday, the Koch Brother's super PAC "Americans for Prosperity" started robocalls against the Plainfield IL library referendum. They have targeted the library for defeat as part of their anti-tax agenda. "Americans for Prosperity" is good at quoting facts that don't exist and slinging mud at the common good. We need your help to answer this Koch funded anti-library smear campaign now, and your help in future to build a defense against their anti-library agenda.

State lawmakers have introduced a bill to add libraries to the restriction put in place in 2012 that prohibits smoking within 100 feet of school entrances or exits.

“Today, I am proud to extend that smoke-free protection even further to include the entrances and exits of our state’s libraries,” said Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, D-Bronx, in a statement. He's sponsoring the bill with Sen. Gustavo Rivera, D-Bronx.

We’re not being asked to choose between security and privacy. We’re being asked to choose between less security and more security.

This trade-off isn’t new. In the mid-1990s, cryptographers argued that escrowing encryption keys with central authorities would weaken security. In 2011, cybersecurity researcher Susan Landau published her excellent book Surveillance or Security?, which deftly parsed the details of this trade-off and concluded that security is far more important. Ubiquitous encryption protects us much more from bulk surveillance than from targeted surveillance. For a variety of technical reasons, computer security is extraordinarily weak.

If a sufficiently skilled, funded, and motivated attacker wants in to your computer, they’re in. If they’re not, it’s because you’re not high enough on their priority list to bother with. Widespread encryption forces the listener – whether a foreign government, criminal, or terrorist – to target. And this hurts repressive governments much more than it hurts terrorists and criminals.